New Directions in Environmental Law Conference Scheduled for March 1

The Yale Environmental Law Association will host the fourth annual New Directions in Environmental Law conference on March 1, 2014. This year’s conference, planned by students at Yale Law School and Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, takes as its theme “Breaking the Stalemate.” With national politics broadly and environmental policy specifically stuck in partisan trench warfare, this conference seeks to identify ways forward.

Cape Wind CEO Jim Gordon will deliver the conference keynote address. Gordon will share the lessons learned working to build the first offshore wind energy project in the United States, a project which has been over a decade in the making. Gordon will provide a private-sector perspective on how law can help—and hinder—a shift toward a clean energy future.

The conference will feature two panels and ten roundtable workshops addressing issues from local land use to international law, and everything in between. The first plenary panel, titled “Moving Forward in a Time of Gridlock and Austerity,” will explore how budget cuts, government shutdown, and legislative gridlock have affected environmental policymaking. The second panel, “Frontiers of Energy Regulation: The California Example,” will look at how one state has blazed a path forward in the energy sector.

This year’s New Directions in Environmental Law conference builds on the momentum that has already been generated over the past three years. The student-organized conference brings together hundreds of students, scholars, practitioners, and policymakers from across the Northeast with the goal of providing new ideas and energy for environmental law and policy. The conference is co-sponsored by the Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy and by Yale Law School.

“What makes NDEL exciting is that each year new student leadership brings new ideas and, well, new directions,” said Josh Galperin, Associate Director of the Yale Center for Environmental Law & Policy. “The 2014 NDEL leadership team is really exceptional because for the first time it is a truly interdisciplinary team with students from YLS and the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. This is exactly the sort of collaboration that we try to encourage at the Center for Environmental Law & Policy, and of all the events that we sponsor, this is the one that I am most proud of.”

More information about the conference, including an up-to-date list of speakers and online registration, can be found on the conference web pages. The conference is free for all members of the Yale or New Haven community.